"Good" Music Part I
by Doug Adams
As I predicted, there were several people who did not agree with my
assessment of James Horner's score to Titanic. However, I didn't
get nearly as much hate mail as I thought I would--and I'd like to thank
everyone who wrote in, even the irate. I was still mulling over the reactions
from that column when I went to see Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting.
In Good Will Hunting, Danny Elfman's score doesn't really get
rolling until the second half of the picture. The first half contains a
few too many pop tunes for my personal tastes (which may render the film
quite dated in a few years), but they were actually pretty well used for
the most part. Once the underscore is given some room, it, like Titanic,
goes mainly to the emotional setting of the piece. There are some Celtic
influences like penny whistles and the such (remember the story takes place
in Boston), and warm choral writing, and things like this. No great mental
stretches, no profound character revelations, none of those oblique crystallizations
of undercurrents that people like me love to go on about. Yet, while Elfman's
score to Good Will is hardly revolutionary, it's tremendously effective
in setting up a feelings of both familiarity and searching. The character
of Will is happy in his beer-bum life style, but he really knows that the
world demands more of him because of his abilities.
Unlike Horner's Titanic, however, this score doesn't appeal only
to the "warm fuzzies". Horner puts most of his effort into writing
his aching melodies, while Elfman is emphasizing his newfound obsession
with textures and coloristic writing. Isn't it interesting that for all
his conservatory training, Horner has ended up as film music's tunesmith
while rock-weaned Elfman is dealing with the true instrumental intricacies?
That's particularly noteworthy in this score because it marks the first
time that Elfman has dealt with very simple harmonic devices in a non-linear
way. (If we look at Sommersby or Black Beauty, his other
pastoral scores, the approach was almost completely melodically derived.)
His textural style began around the time of Dead Presidents, and
since then he's worked mainly on films with heightened realities. Mission
Impossible, Mars Attacks!, Flubber, and so on could all handle Elfman's
usual helping of augmented harmonies and dissonances because the film's
topics were so far out. In Good Will Hunting, he's got to keep his
modulations and extended harmonies down, lest this thing come off like
a parody. It'd be like scoring Will's scientific knowledge with a theremin!
When Elfman writes things that are both melodic and textural he tends
to write very fragmental melodies--a la Flubber. In Good Will,
Elfman mostly throws his high profile melodies out, and concentrates on
a kind of warm, tonal counterpoint of very short motives. Some ideas are
stressed more than others, but there's never one, long-form melody that
he has to tackle in order to keep his score contiguous. Again, it's no
great stretch for Elfman's compositional prowess, but this tonal-mosaic
construction frees him to layer in his Irish- isms, and choirs, and strings,
and so on with out being lead-handed. And for the listener/viewer, it makes
for a rewarding "emotional" experience--denser, more thorough
music that you can actually listen in to, instead of basking in surface-level
immediacy. Maybe it's a bit too active, maybe it's not 100% successful,
but at least it's intriguing and effective--not just one or the other.
So, in my opinion, if you're looking for a emotional score attached to
an Oscar-bait film, Good Will Hunting has a good deal more... well,
depth than Titanic.
Amistad Vs. Amistad
While most people first became aware of the story of La Amistad when
Steven Spielberg's film opened, few film fans realize that an opera version
of the same story actually opened a few weeks earlier. The Lyric Opera
of Chicago production of "Amistad", with a score by Anthony Davis
and a libretto by Thulani Davis, has received quite a bit of press as of
late (most of the major behind the scenes people from Spielberg's film
have stopped by to watch it), because this opera was written by a black
man, and contains elements of black American music. Recently, Gene Siskel
and Chicago Tribune classical music critic John Von Rhein sat down to do
a movie vs. opera discussion. They touched briefly on John Williams' score,
culminating in Von Rhein's comment: "In its own way, composer John
Williams' score for the Spielberg film succeeds much better [than the opera]
because it functions at the level of popular entertainment, not high art.
The soundtrack helps Spielberg tell a powerful narrative on a gut level,
which is the only way to put the Amistad story across meaningfully if you
are pitching it to a mass audience or even to a more specialized crowd
that goes to the opera. There is no music in the opera as effective as
the soft humming of an African woman in the indelible opening sequence
of the film."
Talk about a backhanded complement. There's a part of me that's thrilled
that an opera/classical critic acknowledged that Williams' score is better
that the opera. (And I've seen the opera and totally agree with him.) But,
I'm so annoyed that he tried to summon the demons of "high" and
"low" art in order to support his point. I'm already running
long for this column, but let me say this briefly: folks, in my book there
are really no such things as "high" art and "low" art.
These are constructs; something invented by the blue bloods for one simple
reason. In order to secure the sanctity of the social superiority of certain
art forms (and therefore the form's clientele), there exists the need for
an "anti". In other words, we can't define "red" without
defining "green"--we need something that isn't "red"
in order to solidify its limits. "Low" art, as a classification
exists in order for "high" art to have something that it is not.
It's an amazing sociological phenomenon that we often define ourselves
more by what we're against that what we're for, but in this case, it's
detrimental. Anything vaguely smacking of popularism (anything influenced
by Tin Pan Alley, jazz, pop, etc.) is somehow dismissed as being inappropriate
for "high" art because it injects too much of the "anti".
Good film music, I hope, is based on the idea that the musical ends justify
the needs. Many of composer Mychael Danna's scores use elements of techno
music. It's also amazing that most people who would categorically reject
something like techno are really doing so because they are against the
social climate associated with the music, not the music itself. Putting
borders on acceptable forms of musical creativity is ridiculous. "High"
and "low" seek to force some sort of pre-determined constant
on the listener that is, in my opinion, non-existent. "Good"
and "bad" are what we need to talk about. I'll get off the soapbox
now, but I dearly hope our readers understand this. If not, film music
may end up like concert hall music--in danger of being completely and unjustly
forgotten within about three generations.
Next Week: "Good" Music Part 2: Hans Zimmer's As
Good As It Gets, and Good Things About 1997.
Doug@filmscoremonthly.com
|
